Trump's Soldiers in Cities -- Violates a Law the Right Used To Love

The Posse Comitatus Act was passed in the US Congress in 1876 (and signed into law by Rutherford B. Hayes), reportedly to quell the brute force that Union soldiers were sometimes using on former Confederates to force the acceptance of former slaves as citizens. Alarming reports had been made. The Congress, dominated by Republicans, took action. The Act severely limited the involvement of US military in law enforcement.

Posse Comitatus is fancy Latin. Posse means force. Comitatus is often translated as "county" but refers to something deeper, an ancient respect for any local company of citizens who have formed a government. In other words, the Posse Comitatus Act declared that the legal license to force obedience to the rules lies with the locals and nobody else. Hence, the Sheriff's posse of many a Western. Certainly not the US Army, whose enlisted members at the time the law was passed thought they had every reason under God's blue sky to get rough with the defeated (and already humiliated) rebels.

Posse Comitatus became a thing among some far-Right groups/militias in the late 20th Century, an elaborate rationale for localized white supremacist resistance to integration and other Federal laws that intrude on reality. Some Southern sheriffs took the attitude that their right to use force was supreme over what any fucking woke Federal law said.

Reporter Brian Kerem:

The MAGA minions are becoming alarmed at the president’s flagrant violation of the Posse Comitatus law, which is supposed to keep the government from using the military as police officers. The law was a direct result of the Civil War, and it was originally proposed by, wait for it…Republicans....

The difference between Trump’s second and first administrations is seen best in this one issue. In his first term, Trump didn’t know what the Posse Comitatus Act even was. That’s a fact. CQ Roll Call’s John T. Bennett and I were the two reporters who asked about Trump's violating it. The president had no idea it existed, and his staff referred to it as “that Hakuna Matata thing.” Now Trump and his people know what it is — and they don’t care.

In a press conference sponsored by the Vet Voice Foundation, retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton said that Trump’s use of the military is “not just a distraction” but will do “long-term generational harm to the military and civil liberties.”

Former Democratic Rep. Max Rose, who represented New York’s 11th congressional district and once served in the National Guard, outlined it this way: “The mission is the problem here, not only because of the undue power domestically that it’s giving the president of the United States…it is to scare the hell out of millions of people, principally those who disagree with him, as well as his political opponents. That’s what’s going on here. That’s why it’s being done in such a public, brazen manner.”